Archive for July, 2017

Lizzy Goodman’s oral history beautifully captures the guitar rock scene in New York from 2001 to 2011, a flashbulb moment before everything changed

In the opening two years of the 21st century, guitar-based rock enjoyed a late burst of creativity. The music industry was still thriving, yet to be laid waste by the internet. Meanwhile, New York, a city that had long been a byword for rock and its associated romance, was on the brink of a musical renaissance – and an awful trauma – before property mania transformed even its most disreputable neighbourhoods, after which affluent incomers could happily live out some dream or other, but the conditions for any kind of exciting culture were too often snuffed out.

This is the backdrop of Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history by Lizzy Goodman, who arrived in New York from her native New Mexico in 1999 and was evidently immersed in everything that happened. Her interviewees – there are 161 – beautifully capture the era, and illustrate its tensions and contradictions, many of which swirl around the band whose tale forms the book’s core. The Strokes were a quintet of affluent young men who had met at exclusive schools, led by a singer whose father had founded the Elite model agency. On the face of it, they were gentrification incarnate. But in the flesh, and on their first two albums, they convincingly celebrated the aspects of New York that were under threat – bohemian squalor, loose living, the idea of the metropolis as a place where twentysomethings discover who they are – and became a potent signifier for the city.

We just want to tell you, we want to do this for the rest of our lives

In ignoring the party’s remainers and embracing hard Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell risk inviting economic doom for the sake of ideology

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist

In advance of Brexit negotiations really getting down to the nitty-gritty, British politics currently resembles an unruly works outing to a restaurant. Philip Hammond seemingly wants the vegetarian option. Liam Fox fancies coq au chlorine. David Davis keeps asking the waiter for another five minutes, while Boris Johnson insists on cake. Theresa May, meanwhile, is away, enjoying the pleasures of authentic Italian cuisine and presumably readying herself for the dread moment when the 27 remaining countries of the EU decisively begin kicking Britain around, and the inevitable becomes obvious: either it’s the set menu, or we’re out.

Leaving the EU was meant to be Thatcherism’s finale, but could turn out to be its death instead

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist

The centenary year of the Russian revolutions of 2017 highlights an accidentally topical question: what do revolutionaries do when they actually get their revolution? The immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, wrote Leon Trotsky, often boiled down to “legislative improvisation”. In his autobiography, My Life, he explained the general idea as follows: “Everything had to proceed from the beginning. There were no ‘precedents’, since history had none to offer … As a rule, matters were brought up for consideration without previous preparation, and almost always as urgent business.”

Those who still hope to stop us leaving the EU need to think harder about the repercussions: the politics of the referendum period could come roaring back

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Social media is awash with it. In a certain kind of company, conversation inevitably turns to it. Now, even senior broadcast journalists hint that it might be possible, triggering great surges of online excitement. Barely a year after the EU referendum and only three months since the Daily Mail’s triumphal “Crush the saboteurs” front page, you can almost smell it: a rising expectation that the nightmare of leaving the EU might somehow be averted, allowing the country to return to some kind of normal.

The tents may be down but the spirit of Glastonbury lives on – while the Tories are stuck in the 1950s

British Conservatism – with both a big and small “c” – is once again feeling the pangs of crisis. Tory optimists might be hanging on to the fact that their party has just scored its highest vote share since 1983; as Brexit grinds uncertainly on, Britain remains in the grip of an avowedly rightwing vision. But the last time a Tory government was elected with a convincing majority was 1987. The UK’s big cities seem more impervious to Conservative politics than ever. The fact that the Tories did so badly among people under the age of 45 – 55% of whom backed Labour, while only 29% voted Conservative – underlines the sense of slowly gathering twilight.